Asunción Gómez-Pérez - Böcker

Ontological Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them.

Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define, with different levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and the relationships between them. Ontological Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies. Ontologies are now widely used in Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science; in applications related to areas such as Knowledge Management, Natural Language Processing, e-Commerce, Intelligent Information Integration, Bio-Informatics, Education; and in new emerging fields like the Semantic Web. The book presents the major issues of Ontological Engineering and describes the most outstanding ontologies that are currently available. It covers the practical aspects of selecting and applying methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies.Ontological Engineering will be of great value to students and researchers, and to developers who want to integrate ontologies in their information systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2005, heldin Heraklion, Crete, Greece in May/June 2005.The 48 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 148 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on semantic Web services, languages, ontologies, reasoning and querying, search and information retrieval, user and communities, natural language for the semantic Web, annotation tools, and semantic Web applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2002, held in Siguenza, Spain in October 2002. The 20 revised full papers and 14 revised short papers presented together with an invited contribution were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 110 submissions. The papers address all current issues in knowledge processing and key ingredients for building the semantic web, such as ontologies, knowledge modeling and representation, languages and tools, knowledge management, and knowledge acquisition.

The current Internet has undergone an essential transformation: it has changed from a network of networks that enables access to remote machines by a cons- tentprotocolsuite(TCP/IP),toanetworkofcontent,applications,andservices. Thus, it has become a modern commodity for everyone. The Future Internet(FI) is destinedtocontinue this developmentandto p- videimprovedfeaturesandusabilityforindividualsandbusiness.Itsapplications are expected to originate from areas such as entertainment, health, energy grid, utilities and the environment, transport, mobility, and logistics. Tight economic constraints, however, require the Future Internet to consolidate and converge application-speci?c networks and support for the Internet of Services (IoS), the Internet of Things (IoT), and the Internet of Content (IoC) in a homogenous and, if possible, a single system. A simple investigation of network performance requirements of the ant- ipated FI applications reveals a set of contrary needs that have challenged research on network architectures and protocols for decades. Only a few - plications have been successful, e.g., P2P systems, which can adapt easily to heterogeneousenvironments.Similarly, semantic technologyhas providedme- ingful relationships of content, but has failed when it has come to manageability and performance in universal and heterogeneous network systems.

The Semantic Web is characterized by the existence of a very large number of distributed semantic resources, which together define a network of ontologies. These ontologies in turn are interlinked through a variety of different meta-relationships such as versioning, inclusion, and many more. This scenario is radically different from the relatively narrow contexts in which ontologies have been traditionally developed and applied, and thus calls for new methods and tools to effectively support the development of novel network-oriented semantic applications.This book by Suárez-Figueroa et al. provides the necessary methodological and technological support for the development and use of ontology networks, which ontology developers need in this distributed environment. After an introduction, in its second part the authors describe the NeOn Methodology framework. The book’s third part details the key activities relevant to the ontology engineering life cycle. For each activity, a general introduction, methodological guidelines, and practical examples are provided. The fourth part then presents a detailed overview of the NeOn Toolkit and its plug-ins. Lastly, case studies from the pharmaceutical and the fishery domain round out the work.The book primarily addresses two main audiences: students (and their lecturers) who need a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on ontology engineering, and practitioners who need to develop ontologies in particular or Semantic Web-based applications in general. Its educational value is maximized by its structured approach to explaining guidelines and combining them with case studies and numerous examples. The description of the open source NeOn Toolkit provides an additional asset, as it allows readers to easily evaluate and apply the ideas presented.